Simon Rumble’s blog

I'm cooking breakfast for our little food co-op tomorrow. Once a fortnight, we send someone out to Flemington to buy fruit and veg for the 11 households. This means we get a staggering quantity of stuff for about $25. Bargain! Then we meet up at someone's house and have brekkie before divvying up the loot.

I was planning to do an ordinary fry-up on the BBQ, as that's an easy way to cater for the crowds. The weather looks like it's gonna be shite though, so I've changed my mind and I'll do Eggs Benedict. You might think this is a bit ambitious for a crowd, but I actually think it'd be easier to coordinate than most other dishes.

Hollandaise, despite its temperamental reputation, is actually dead easy to make, now that I have the tip given to me by the main dude at my favourite cafe, Martini. All the recipes you read talk about complicated strategies involving double-boilers and simmering over boiling water. Turns out that's the bloody hard way. Instead what you do is heat up your butter and dribble it into the mixture while madly whisking. The butter's heat cooks the mix enough for my tastes, and you still get the nice thick sauce (which is caused by emulsification just like mayonnaise, not protein coagulation). It's always worked perfectly for me. Probably not hot enough for the food hygiene nazis but fine for me.

Now the tricky part of my plan is getting that many poached eggs out without there being quite a delay between each person. I'm planning to try the method given in McGee that is supposedly how it's done in restaurants. You salt the water to a fairly precise ratio, bring it to the boil and then just drop your eggs in. When they're done, they float to the top and you scoop them out. I haven't got the book to hand so can't tell you the secret ratio.

Has anyone used this method? How'd it go?

It's almost ten years after the Bringing Them Home report about the Stolen Generation. The report has been mostly ignored.

I will preference Labor as number 2 on my ballot if they make a clear statement that they will formally apologise to the Stolen Generation. Right now, there's nothing since 2005 on their web site, so I'm not too hopeful.

Nowhere near as good as the one anomalous did, but here they are.

George Michaelson has thrown down the gauntlet for aspiring Photoshop/GIMP manglers with this photo taken from the Smage.

Anomalous has already responded with this great Mad Max III one.

We want more!

I'm very upset about this. My favourite radio station, The Global Pop Conspiracy has shut down. It was such a brilliant station, always playing new and interesting music.

I discovered a few really great bands through them including controller.controller and Immaculate Machine.

They were always a bit mysterious, so I'm hoping one of them will find this post and let me know where I can get my fix from or perhaps you know?

If you're not in Sydney you probably don't know this, but it's been raining solidly for the last 36 hours or so. Of course none of this rain is going to reach the catchments of the dams that supply Sydney's water. The big problem is our dams are in the wrong place, or the city is in the wrong place. So I have a solution to our water problems. It will require a small adjustment to the Constitution and will be acceptable to the cast majority of Sydney people.

Here it is: bulldoze Vaucluse and build a big dam. There's always loads of rain on the Eastern Suburbs, even when it's not reaching the dams. And there's nobody interesting living there. Only rich nobs.

The constitutional change required? We need to amend paragraph 51(xxxi), otherwise known as The Castle clause to "the acquisition of property on just terms from any State or person for any purpose in respect of which the Parliament has power to make laws, except for rich nobs who get no just terms."

Simple really. You gotta wonder why someone hasn't come up with it before.

My OpenGuide site, The Tourist Engineer is finally working again. Thanks to Kake for prodding and fixing the database format. That made all the difference!

The site is a tourist guide for geeks, looking at architectural marvels, giant infrastructure, geeky historical sites and the like.

I'll continue maintaining this site, but I'm also thinking of starting an Open Guide to Sydney, in the mould of London and Boston. These are open Wiki guides to cities, and when they work well they're absolutely brilliant. Sydney doesn't have much in the way of free, open guides to things. Most seem to be search-engine-harvesting "guides" with plain listings and no real opinion. There's nothing as good as the ever amazing Beer In The Evening. I think we need to harness some of this user-generated goodness for Sydney.

In the meantime, please check out The Tourist Engineer and feel free to jump in and add new sites.

Holly and I ordered a new mattress for our bed last weekend. We've not been sleeping well for a month or two now, due to the crappy, saggy old mattress. The new one arrived on Saturday and it's amazing. We've slept like babies the last two nights, and both of us feel a whole lot more alert.

Quite amazing the impact of a mattress eh? Maybe we're getting old...

I couldn't help imagining my local bum's plaintive "spare change" request when I saw Ben Fargher (now there's an unfortunate surname), CEO of the National Farmer's Federation on the telly last night. He was talking doom and gloom, food price rises and the collapse of civilisation as we know it due to the drought. The (ABC) news then switched to pictures of parched fields with the voice-over talking about how this farmer's cotton couldn't be planted. Cotton? WTF?

The farming lobby has skillfully played on Australians' delusional self-image of being country folk for years, winning torrents of corporate welfare for themselves in the process. In reality we're one of the most concentrated urban societies in the world. You can be absolutely sure the farmers will win some more handouts in the latest drought.

The thing is, why should farming be treated like any other business? The biggest landowners in Australia are actually giant agribusinesses, hardly the image of the hard working battling cocky. Of course you won't see images of business suited agribusiness chairmen sitting around boardroom tables in anything put out by the farming lobby. Instead we'll see the Akubra-wearing cocky propping up the gate on his parched patch of dirt.

Now if I were to set up a little corner shop without doing my homework and discover there's no demand in the area for what I'm selling, I wouldn't expect a government handout when the business failed. Why is farming any different? Any business should do its research into market conditions, and for farming the climatic conditions would be one of the most important aspects. Anyone who couldn't see the writing on the wall for farming at least twenty years ago really hasn't been paying attention.

What's more, we farm absolutely ridiculous crops for our climate. What the hell are we doing growing insanely water-intensive crops like cotton and rice in this country?

The problem with further handouts to farmers is that it actively encourages poor farming patterns. Instead of penalising bad decisions, which is what our free-market government claims to want, we reward them by bailing them out every time Australia's climate turns for the worse. What's more, this pattern effectively penalises those farmers who have changed their methods to be more in tune with our climate, since they're not eligible for the handouts.

If the farmers' methods were rational, they'd be able to use standard market mechanisms like insurance and hedging (paid during the good years) instead of relying on the public purse.

Farming in Australia, and anywhere for that matter, will always be a somewhat risky occupation. But most businesses have important variables that are way out of their control, so why should farming be treated any differently?

Any handouts given during the current drought should be tied to radical changes in our farming methods. In many cases that means abandoning the most marginal lands. Don't expect these kinds of hard decisions to be made by any of the geniuses vying to win the election this year though.

My mate Hanesy's film, The Truth About Weapons of Mass Destruction, after a long and tortuous birth, is about to hit the festival circuit. I haven't seen the final cut but the earlier cuts were great, give or take a long bagpipe sequence.

The film follows Paul and his mates travelling from London through the Channel Tunnel to the World War I battlefields of Belgium and Northern France. Over the course of that war, millions of chemical weapons were fired across no man's land. A large proportion of these weapons failed to detonate in the muddy quagmire that was the front, and some of the chemicals used are stable enough to still be viable today.

Paul drives around the fields and finds some of these unexploded weapons of mass destruction lying by the road awaiting collection by the Belgian Army's specialist bomb disposal unit. He then meets up with that unit and tours with them to see the process of destruction of these weapons. One hilarious scene has the Belgian army guy telling them that if the filmmakers see him running, they should "run faster".

The main thrust of the movie is to point out how easy it would be to collect some of the unexploded shells and use them for terrorism. Only an hour's drive away from London, these shells are lying in fields for weeks at a time waiting for someone to pick them up.

What's truly scandalous is that the countries responsible for making and firing all these scary weapons are being tight arses on paying for their disposal. It's mostly left to the Belgian government to fund the collection and destruction of these weapons. Paul's film shows why it's in everyone's interest to ensure that these weapons are collected and destroyed quickly and securely so they don't fall into the wrong hands. They're going to be turning up in the fields of Belgium for the foreseeable future.

I can just imagine the furore if the europhobe newspapers like The Sun or the Daily Fascist got hold of it. Another peril from those garlic-swilling continentals!

Congratulations to Paul for making it into the shortlist for an award at the Swansea Bay Film Festival and the offical selection at the Everglades Film Festival in South Africa.